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The decline of the American Empire

[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.—Edward Gibbon, from the Decline and Fall

Perhaps you have noticed a common theme in my recent columns. Each policy proposed to solve our economic, oil or climate problems I have examined has a fatal flaw, and often more than one. New initiatives always seem dead on arrival.
Cap & Trade is not likely to be enacted but if it is, the law would raise energy costs while making only token CO2 emission reductions as in Europe. President Obama put forward a proposal to think about, not build, an expanded passenger or freight rail system in the United States. A “harmonized double standard” for increased CAFE fuel efficiency mandates that cars average 39 miles-per-gallon by 2016, which probably translates to 29 miles-per-gallon in EPA bureaucratese.
On the economic front things are the same. Change we can believe in quickly morphed into a doomed attempt to return our flawed banking system to business as usual. As the Fed and the Treasury continue to bail out the banks, Arianna Huffington tells Tech Ticker’s Aaron Task that—
… the [Obama] administration is avoiding the big problems [in finance]…Tim Geithner and Larry Summers were creatures of Wall Street… [and they] are like people who still believe the world is flat. They see everything revolving around the Earth and in their case that’s Wall Street. That’s not good if you’re producing maps to navigate.
Even if we require a functioning financial system to speed any “recovery” we might get, few are thinking about what those banks will invest in after our economy bottoms out. More McMansions in the exurbs? More shopping malls? Who will buy these houses miles from nowhere? And then fill up the GMC Yukon to shop at Saks and eat at the Cheesecake Factory? Some over-leveraged consumers will gas up & go, but most will not, at least not as frequently as they used to. People need to pay down their debt as they try to hang on to their low-paying jobs. Our FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) will try to blow another bubble, but we’re quickly running out of quality assets whose value we can inflate.......
.......Bingeing on debt is reckless, and financialization has a long record of being a dangerous late stage in the trajectory of previous leading world economic powers. Moving money around instead of making things is always dicey, and the U.S. transformation has been the most grandiose to date…
Money is “bad,” in the historical sense, when a leading world economic power passing its zenith — before the United States, think Hapsburg Spain, the maritime Dutch Republic (when New York was New Amsterdam), and imperial Britain just before World War I — lets itself luxuriate in finance at the expense of harvesting, manufacturing, or transporting things. Doing so has marked each nation’s global decline. To institutionalize the dominance of minimally regulated finance at this stage of U.S. history is a bad idea........
......Phillips is talking about the Decline of the American Financial Empire. When our society “luxuriates in finance at the expense of harvesting, manufacturing or transporting things,” we cling to the status quo instead of acting to solve the problems confronting it. We dig our heels in, our inertia grows stronger. The problems (too much debt, too little oil) do not go away. Unattended to, they get worse, as do the eventual consequences of inaction.........
........Eric Janszen at Tulip took a close look at consumer confidence (aka. sentiment) after the Conference Board’s latest survey. You would think confidence would correlate with job prospects, right? It does not. Consumer confidence follows the stock market! Specifically, sentiment corresponds to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).......
.......Janszen believes “the DJIA index is used by the FIRE Economy financial media [e.g. CNBC] to sell the current state of the economy [to consumers or investors]… The DJIA has virtually no economic significance compared to the broad stock indexes such as the S&P index and the NASDAQ that have many times the capitalization of the DOW.” In a related development, bankrupt General Motors and insolvent Citigroup were dropped from the Dow index on June 1st. They were replaced by Cisco Systems and Travelers, respectively. That should improve consumer expectations considerably!
Bullish speculation in stocks bolsters consumer confidence based on … nothing at all. Confident consumers are seen as prone to spend more money, which begets bullish speculation. Many Americans think the worst is behind us. They expect a wave a new jobs to appear any day now. This is wishful thinking.
The fundamentals of our vaporous economy are terrible. This speculative frenzy doesn’t change the sorry state of Main Street. It’s just a lot of hot air on Wall Street, which is trying to re-inflate stock prices. This new equities bubble (Figure 3) is like some bizarre Wheel of Fortune—round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows.
All this behavior is utterly futile if our goal is a sound economy & recovery.
I could tell stories like this all day long, touching on political infighting, corruption or undue influence up and down the Wall Street-Washington corridor, or the docility of our passive citizenry brought about by 30 years of consumer training. I would run out of time long before I ran out of material.
Everything—I mean every single thing—is broken, including health care costs & coverage, the energy markets, the economy as a whole, public education, physical infrastructure, insurmountable deficits at the local, state and Federal levels, etc.
Can We Put Humpty Together Again?
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,Couldn’t put Humpty together again—A Nursery rhyme
Is there any hope? I’m talking about real hope, not the daily barrage of pernicious nonsense that passes for serious discourse in the United States. No radical transformation of our society will occur unless we can overcome our social inertia. We would need to get serious, escape futility, do real things again.
The first step would be to acknowledge what a sorry state we’re in. Speaking with Bill Moyers back in September, Kevin Phillips didn’t think soon-to-be President Barack Obama would level with the American people about how bad things are. If the President indeed understands the depths to which we’ve sunk, he has not come clean with us—you don’t rock that boat.
History suggests that we will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Imperial greatness reaches an apogee and then follows a downhill trajectory. We had it good once, but now we cling to old dreams—like Rome, we prop them up with Edward Gibbon’s artificial supports—instead of confronting unpleasant realities. The old vitality is gone. In the United States we carry out studies explaining why the cost of nuclear power is prohibitive. The Chinese build nuclear power plants.
America is like an Obsessive-Compulsive who has lost his keys and keeps looking for them in the same drawer over and over again. We never tire of making the same mistakes, believing that “More Is Better” without acknowledging that it was this kind of flawed thinking that got us into this predicament in the first place.
Here’s what Paul Krugman said about California, which is a complete mess.
California, it has long been claimed, is where the future happens first. But is that still true? If it is, God help America…
What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion…
… and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.
Don’t worry about it, Paul. The future looks like California just as it always has. As Gibbon said of the Romans, prosperity ripened the principle of decay, the causes of destruction multiplied and eventually the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
In the near future I’ll get back to writing about our futile efforts to put 1 million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015 and similar fantasies. And if I’m alive in 20 years, I’ll write another article called The Decline & Fall of the American Empire.